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Robert Whitaker offers the following...

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5. Brain Damage as Miracle Therapy

The fourth "brain-damaging" therapeutic that was embraced in asylum medicine in the 1930s and early 1940s was prefrontal lobotomy. This operation was pronounced safe and effective in numerous trials, and in 1949 its inventor, Portuguese neurosurgeon Egas Moniz, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine. Many physicians who tried it concluded that the operation could not possible harm the mentally ill, and during the 1940s newspapers and magazines regularly wrote about this "miracle" therapy for curing mental disorders. Today, this operation is viewed as a mutilating surgery, and its rise and fall provides a cautionary tale about the capacity of a society to delude itself about the merits of its medical treatments for the mentally ill.

Source: Mad In America



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